RBOC: Pre-moving prep

The grumbles:

• How nice of Ghosttown's municipal government to summon me for jury duty right at the end of my time here.  How extra-nice of them to mail the letter late, so that I have per force missed the deadline to fill out an affidavit explaining that I'll be out of town at that time.  How stupid and bizarre that the letter somehow had to be routed through Major Regional City, even though I live a mile from the courthouse itself.  How charming that I must explain to these chuckleheads that, because of their slowness, I will just have to fill out the affidavit one week before the jury duty date that I will miss.  Sigh.
• It's actually befuddling how many options there are nowadays for moving house.  After lining out price comparisons of trucks, pods, and trailers, it seems the easiest thing for me is, bien sûr, also the most expensive: hiring a trailer that will drive my stuff to my new location for me, so that I don't have to mess around with winching my car to a moving truck or hire some hapless, feckless grad student to drive one vehicle or the other.  (Yes, someone actually suggested this.)  It's annoying to have to put so much on my credit cards this summer, since there's no way even to begin paying it down until I start getting paid again, but since I have a decent sum of moving expense reimbursement from CBU, I'm not going to sweat it.  
• I'm trying to be parsimonious with my increasingly sparse cash reserves, since I may have to part with two months' rent up front for whatever place I might rent.  That means that I can't pay my credit card bills in full as usual, so right now I feel guilty and embarrassed about carrying balances.  And then I remember that I have a tendency to be too hard on myself about mundane crap like this.
• On Thursday, I'm driving up to CBU to hunt for an apartment (or a house?) to rent, since it has proved so difficult to find good prospects via internet.  CBU is located in Tinytown, which is so small that, as I suspect, people don't bother paying for classified ads; instead, they just rely on word of mouth through their social networks.  Either I'm on the scene to present myself to the potential landlord, or I'm not.  Gonna be a freaking road warrior this week: after streaking up there and running around the area, I have to drive back to Ghosttown on Sunday.  It will be a very tired Koshary that staggers into his apartment that evening.
• Speaking of the apartment hunt, I'm starting to admit to myself that I might not be able to find anything in Tinytown, period, and must therefore extend my search further.  The immediate surroundings of Tinytown have precious little to recommend them, so the obvious choice is to start snooping around the western suburbs of Huge Regional City, which is where most CBU professors live.  I was hoping to avoid a daily 45-minute commute, especially given what I have heard about winters in Tinytown, but perhaps this is just the way it must be.  

The exciting murmurs: 

• Today, I powered down my office computer for the last time, locked the door, and surrendered my university keys to the department secretary.  I'm really out of Ghosttown U.
  *turns a digital cartwheel of delight*
• The fun part of watching my finances, insofar as there is one, is that my brother turned me on to an online bank with better rates than any brick-and-mortar bank I could have found in my soon-to-be-new state.  I closed out my account at the regional branch here in Ghosttown today, and deposited the cashier's check for the balance in my new account — by photographing it and uploading the pictures to the online bank.  Seriously: I now deposit checks by photographing them with my iPhone.  O, brave new world that has such gadgets in't!
• On the positive side of heading for the suburbs rather than the small town, living over in HRC would at least lessen the sense of isolation.  I've heard great things about downtown HRC, and it's only 45 minutes from there down the road to Massive University Town.  (As well as to Tinytown.)  MUT is supposed to be a lot of fun for overeducated, liberal elitists like me, particularly given the mainstream culture of the state, and I have every intention of getting down there from time to time to explore.
• Oh, and another thing about HRC and MUT: there are women there.  Many, many women.  I'm not sure that anyone who reads this blog can fully comprehend how exciting this is for me, after a year of living in a town in which there appear to be virtually no women in my natural dating range.  I'm hoping for a lot of positive unbloggable interactions.  (But I'll keep the sadsack breakup songs, just in case.)
• One more thing about HRC and MUT: I know, I'm going overboard with the acronyms here.  Once I land in my new location and have a chance to gauge the atmosphere, I'll try to come up with some more evocative pseudonyms.